Building Blocks for a Renewed Human Rights Narrative

The human rights discourse as constructed after the Second World War has come under increasingly sweeping attacks both as a global explanation and with respect to the universality of its values. As a more or less general trend, it has been reduced to political correctness, identified as a repressive, taboo-generating discourse. A number of elements, however, have been adopted, sometimes appropriated by extremists in Europe and in Hungary as well. A number of analysts have described how legal advocacy organisations have become silent in public discourse, failing to remain attractive to large groups of young people. Others point to a more profound turn, concerning not only politics but the role of truth in politics, and identifying a “post-truth era” as exemplified by the Brexit and Trump campaigns.

Furthermore, these changes are taking place in the midst of a major shift in the media world that has led to the polarisation of public discourse. Due to the spread of the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies, the procurement of information is based increasingly on content created by people with a similar range of interests. This not only makes it harder to formulate challenges to prejudice or to reject them, but has also enabled the construction of strong subcultures based on xenophobia, anti-Roma attitudes and anti-Semitism in Hungary and elsewhere. In Hungary, this goes hand-in-hand with attempts by the state to discredit organisations protecting human rights. These attacks are for the most part orchestrated by those in power, having launched attacks against several fundamental values, such as measures implemented against the homeless, the campaign against refugees, phrases alluding to “vainglorious human rights banter”, and the creation/import of a new anti-gender argumentation.

These trends make it clear that without protecting and reframing fundamental values, persuading their supporters to act and to speak up, and linking the available platforms of communication, the sphere of human rights protection could be further circumscribed in Hungary.

This work aims to lay the foundations of a collaboration that can be joined by other organisations still being formed, as well as by actors sharing human rights values who can reach out to additional potential supporters in Hungary and abroad. This text is designed to be continuously expanded in the future, so as to further incorporate increasingly sensitive analyses along with a growing pool of creative ideas and recommendations.

The publication is a shortened English translation of the original Hungarian study commissioned by the Open Society Institute in Budapest.